PaulSpoerry.com

Downloadsquad announced yesterday that WordPress 2.7 is due out this evening. Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform put out the first release candidate version of WordPress 2.7 just a few days ago, but a beta version has been available for the last few months.

WordPress 2.7 represents a huge shift away from earlier versions of WordPress – at least in the administration area. Most of the changes will be visible to bloggers, but not blog readers. But the changes in the admin area are huge. First, the navigation menus have all been moved to the left side of the screen, giving you more room at the top of the page. The submenus are all also collapsible, which allows you to navigate the administration interface without reloading the page as often.

You can also customize the admin area by dragging, dropping, adding, or deleting widgets like the Right Now screen which gives you an overview of your blog stats or the QuickPress widget which lets you create a post using a stripped down WYSIWYG editor right from the start page.

WordPress 2.7 also lets you search for and install plugins without leaving the admin area. And for the first time, an automatic upgrade tool is included in WordPress so you can upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 or 2.8 or whatever new versions are on the horizon without having to fire up an FTP client.

Who would have thought… but the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer is designed to help get you get up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for Windows Server. The new installer (which is beta currently) will install popular open source and .NET solutions. Included in the beta release will include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress. My first thought was… “seriously?” IIS is an awesome platform, and it’s nice to see Microsoft embracing that it can serve up more than just Microsoft languages (yes in fact it could for a long time, but it wasn’t easy or direct to do so).

What will be interesting, in regards to Wordpress, is how IIS will handle permalinks and having to use index.php in the url (sometimes, not always). Only time will tell, still exciting that Microsoft is moving in this direction.